Below St. Paul’s streets is an unseen world that’s crucial to our health, comfort and safety. It’s out of sight indeed, but it shouldn’t be out of mind.

Underground water, sewer and other systems are vital public infrastructure, and when emergencies occur — the sewer-line sinkhole that opened last week along Johnson Parkway, for instance — traffic backups like those that resulted on the East Side often are just the beginning of the headaches.

Below our street grid is another highway of sorts, a right-of-way for gas service and electric lines, fiber optics for telephone and cable communications, plus our water supply and sanitary sewer and storm water systems. “That piece of real estate — typically about 60 to 100 feet wide — carries a lot of our quality-of-life services,” St. Paul City Engineer John Maczko, told us.

No one was hurt in the sewer-pipe collapse, and the Metropolitan Council — the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency — said area residents do not need to worry about drinking-water safety or sewage backing up into their homes, the Pioneer Press reported. The damage involves a regional sewer pipe that carries about 12 million gallons of sewage daily from as far north as Forest Lake to the Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant near St. Paul’s downtown airport.

“It’s just amazing what happened down there — to see this huge conduit deteriorated like this is,” St. Paul City Council Member Dan Bostrom, who represents the area, told us.

Inspections with cameras help monitor the condition of some pipes, providing “a view from the inside,” he said, “but, from the outside, you can’t see where it’s deteriorating.”

Steve Schneider, general manager of St. Paul Regional Water Services, tells people the only things you can see from our water utility are the hydrants and water towers. “Everything else is buried.”

The system grew during economic upswings, including boom times like the 1920s and the 1950s, as well as later periods of rapid expansion.

As parts of the system reach the end of their lifespan, the water utility is working on a long-range plan to make sure both buried and above-ground infrastructure is “sustainable for generations to come,” he said.

The system spends about $8 million a year on replacing buried infrastructure, with the cost built into the water rates customers pay.

Replacements include about 10 miles of buried water-main a year on a system of about 1,100 miles. It’s a workable rate, considering that water mains have about a 100-year lifecycle, Schneider explains. “Unfortunately, we’ haven’t been doing 10 miles a year for very long. Over the past 10 years, we’ve ramped up to this level,” and need to catch up.

“What people are going to need to understand is that the provision of uninterrupted water service doesn’t come without a cost. If we want to have our system be reliable and sustainable and resilient into the future, we need to continue the replacements we’re doing and even accelerate them,” he said.

St. Paul, meanwhile, has a sanitary system of about 850 miles — most of it constructed from 1887 to 1958, according to the city’s website — and a storm sewer system of about 450 miles.

It’s a very effective system, but it’s important to be proactive and address issues before they become an emergency, said Bruce Elder, sewer utility division manager.

Televising the system — pulling a closed-circuit TV through a line — is among strategies, with the entire system inspected on a 10-year cycle, Elder said. With the practice, workers are better able to spot defects and make repairs “before we have problems.”

Because digging up a street is both expensive and inconvenient, projects are coordinated among agencies and utilities, under a city ordinance.

That way, Maczko said, “We take the lid off, fix everything underneath it and put the cover back on so, hopefully, we don’t have to come back again.”

Like roads, these underground arteries are among the most basic of public goods — and thus require, among all the goodies competing for public money, high priority.

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